Daniel Arango (b. 1982, Colombia) is an artist, architect, designer, and farmer whose practice moves fluidly between art, architecture, performance, and lived experience. After completing his MFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, Arango embarked on a long-term creative and spiritual journey, working nomadically for over fifteen years across more than seventy countries. His work is shaped by the places he has inhabited and the people he has encountered, unfolding as layered narratives of memory, desire, and imagined futures.
A lifelong sense of displacement runs through Arango’s work. At the age of three, he was taken from Colombia to Miami by his grandparents—an early rupture that left an enduring imprint on his identity. Memories of the Carnival de Barranquilla, tropical birds, and Caribbean color linger alongside later influences, from the beaches and Latin cultures of Miami to the dense grids, structures, and rhythms of New York City, where he studied and worked for many years. These shifting geographies converge in work infused with movement, sensuality, and spiritual inquiry.
With meticulous craftsmanship and an eye for the unseen, Arango creates immersive worlds through a hybrid language of digital drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and film. His work is densely layered with imagery—buildings, bodies, plants, animals, gods, sexuality, food, and digestion—balancing deliberate structure with organic intervention. Many works combine digital printing and hand painting, narrating encounters with nature, people, and environments while blending history with contemporary culture. His sculptural practice often takes the form of temples, altars, confessionals, and shrines that function as sites of ritual, desire, and reflection.
Arango’s recent work expands architecture in nature and into lived sculpture. He is currently building large glass, cube-like structures at his olive farm in Portugal, inspired by classical Greek temples and minimalist architecture. These structures function both as artworks and inhabitable spaces; one serves as his studio, where he works directly with stone and marble sourced from the land to create sculptures and ceramics. He is also developing shrine-like structures inspired by Thai spirit houses and classical temples, incorporating figurines, offerings, and ritual objects through a combination of 3D printing, traditional materials, and handcraft.
His practice further extends into consumer culture and systems of exchange, including the creation of organic cereals, packaging, and the conceptual design of a supermarket as an architectural artwork. Parallel to this, Arango is developing The Spirit House (of Daniel)—a temporary inhabitable structure high in the Colombian Andes, conceived as both shelter and studio, and as a monument to travel, ritual, and a peaceful future.
Arango received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2010), a BFA in Interior Design from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2005), and studied interior architecture at the Instituto Europeo di Design in Madrid (2004). He has worked extensively in New York City and internationally.
EDUCATION
2010 | MFA, Painting (Honors), Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
2005 | BFA, Interior Design, School of Visual Arts (SVA)
2004 | Interior Architecture Studies, Istituto Europeo di Design, Madrid, Spain
HONORS, AWARDS & RESIDENCIES
2011 | The Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL
2010 | MFA Grant Nominee, Joan Mitchell Foundation
2008 | Graduate Trustee Scholarship, RISD
2005 | Best Thesis Winner, School of Visual Arts
2003 | First Place, Herman Miller Competition
2001 | Silas H. Rhodes Merit Chairman’s Scholarship (4-year award)
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2008–2010 | Graduate Teaching Assistant, Rhode Island School of Design
LONG-TERM RESEARCH & SITE-SPECIFIC PROJECTS
2011–Present | Architecture of Queer Memory (Global Archive)
An ongoing mapping project tracing the «living floor plans» of LGBTQ+ cruising grounds and sacred landscapes across 70 countries. The archive documents the choreography of desire and the architecture of erasure through painting, video, and ritual movement.
2020–Present | Rocks (Portugal)
A permanent land intervention and living studio situated on an olive farm near the Fátima pilgrimage route. The project involves the manual construction of paths as «cruising grounds,» treating physical labor as a devotional act and a reclamation of the landscape.
2011–2015 | The Holy K Movement (International)
A four-year project initiated by the artist relinquishing all personal property in New York City to pursue a nomadic practice with a portable studio.
• NYC Interventions: Subversive placement of parodic Holy K cereal boxes within Whole Foods Markets. These functional objects—featuring scannable barcodes—disrupted commercial environments by inserting ritualized art objects into the cycle of consumption.
• Cereal Box Portraits (Disciples): A global search for disciples resulting in commissioned cereal box portraits. Each box functioned as a biography: the front illustrated the individual, «Nutrition Facts» captured personal data, and the reverse featured highly detailed drawings. These works serve as the foundation for the artist’s current video and performance practice.
2009 | Being Matthew (McConaughey)
A site-specific performance series across Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain. Leveraging a strong physical resemblance to the actor, Arango adopted the persona to test the limits of public recognition and social navigation. This work serves as an early foundation for the artist’s current research into the mechanics of cruising, exploring how a body is «read» within a landscape and how identity performance alters the way we occupy public space.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2018 | Installation at Faena (Art Basel Week), Miami Beach, FL
2018 | What Goes Around Comes to Art, Herrick Gallery, London, UK
2016 | Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (Misc. Press), MOCA, Los Angeles, CA
2015 | Exchange: Your Art, Your Space, Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Ireland
2014 | Daniel Arango vs. Kevin Arnold: Faith as Model, Able Fine Art, New York, NY
2014 | 21st Annual Summer Benefit, The Watermill Center, Watermill, NY
2011 | Petite-Mort: Recollections, Forever & Today, Inc., New York, NY
2011 | The Art of Love, Milk Gallery, New York, NY
2010 | New Contemporaries, RISD Museum (Gelman Gallery), Providence, RI
2010 | Graduate Thesis Show, RI Convention Center, Providence, RI
COMMISSIONS
Works held in private collections internationally (USA, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, UK, Norway, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand).